After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it

2 years ago by jdhdbdk to c/vegan

A vegan blue cheese won the prestigious Good Food Award, until the dairy industry forced the foundation to disqualify it with a rule-change.
svamp 22 points 2 years ago

Reminds me of a semla(a Swedish pastry, and a big deal) competition Arla(cow rapists) had here in Sweden a couple of years ago.

The rules where you could use products of any brand and not just Arla, and the winner would be decided by popular vote. Rather quickly a vegan pastry shop got first place by a really high margin to second place. And just like that they got disqualified because the rules changed so now you had to use Arlas products..

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naevaTheRat 7 points 2 years ago

The paradox of bigotry is always the same:

The enemy is weak and pathetic but also if they're not we must crush them.

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rah 7 points 2 years ago

This is a bald faced lie. The headline says

After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award

but it hadn't won:

A plant-based blue cheese was selected as a finalist

After initially being named a finalist

Being named a finalist isn't winning.

I'm astonished that they lie so brazenly. And I'm very disappointed that this community repeats the lie. OP you should be ashamed.

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mriguy 9 points 2 years ago

It wasn’t in the boing boing article, but this is according to the Washington Post:

Climax CEO Oliver Zahn accused the foundation of caving to pressure from dairy cheesemakers in revoking the award. And then he spilled the curds: Climax, it turns out, wasn’t just a finalist — it was set to win the award, a fact that all parties are asked to keep confidential until the official ceremony in Portland, Ore., but was revealed in an email the foundation sent to Climax in January. Based on that information, Zahn and several of his colleagues had planned to attend, booking hotel rooms and making travel plans, until, he says, learning from this reporter that his cheese was no longer in the running.

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rah 0 points 2 years ago

this is according to the Washington Post

Well yes, but actually no.

it was set to win the award

Being set to win an award is not winning an award. It's a less heinous lie but it is still a lie.

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Ptsf 5 points 2 years ago

If you've been emailed "please prepare for attendance to the award ceremony" and your attendance is suddenly no longer required because you've been disqualified, that sort of speaks volumes to the mechanics at play. It doesn't outright prove you were going to win, but you don't owe the competition runners any benefit of the doubt when they had every opportunity to communicate this and make a decision before it got to the point it did.

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Mango 1 point 2 years ago

Every tribe moves the goalposts.

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jdhdbdk -3 points 2 years ago

I just used the headline of the article. And the article is factual, so I don‘t really See the problem.

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Ptsf 1 point 2 years ago

😩 people missing the field for the trees.

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rah 0 points 2 years ago

I don‘t really See the problem

You don't see any problem in posting a headline which is a lie?

Edit: tumbleweed Yeah.

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Fades -2 points 2 years ago

They just fucking proved it WASN’T factual, the fuck you mean???

People like you make the rest of us look foolish, shame on you.

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Lizardking27 -25 points 2 years ago

Good.

If you wanna eat vegan cheese-flavored protein loaf then go for it. I'm sure it tastes fine.

But it's not cheese, so obviously you can't enter it in a cheese contest.

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gregordinary 18 points 2 years ago

But it's not cheese, so obviously you can't enter it in a cheese contest.

Except you can and vegetarian and vegan substitutes are explicitly allowed by the competition in question.

See subcategories towards the bottom of this page: https://goodfoodfdn.org/awards/categories/cheese/

It sounds more like they just never thought a vegan cheese would come close to winning. And when that happened, they planned to make a co-winner, if a vegan cheese was crowned first place. https://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Except the would be winner was disqualified, not for being vegan, but for using an ingredient, "kokum butter", which has not been categorized by authorities as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) yet.

Kokum, for those wondering, is in the mangosteen family (Garcinia) and the fruit is often used as a souring agent in South Asian cooking. The fat from the seed, like cocoa butter, is used in cosmetics but is also edible and has culinary applications.

I get that "rules are rules" and an ingredient was used that wasn't approved... But based on the activities like having a co-winner, leading up to the disqualification makes me think it's not the fact that it's vegan that's a problem, it's the threat and validation that a plant-based product could be great or better than its dairy equivalent.

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jerkface 8 points 2 years ago

If it's made with the same process of cultivating cultures of the same microorganisms, then it is still cheese.

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Mango -3 points 2 years ago

Yeah, there's meaning and definition in words. I'm with France on this.

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